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Those that believed that the US election was over in November were wrong: Donald Trump still needed to survive the electoral college vote.

On 19 December, the 538 electors voted for the next President of the United States, and while they are expected to vote the way that their respective states voted, some are not obliged to.

While Hillary Clinton should have receives 232 votes and the President-elect 306 votes, the result actually revealed that five Democrat electors didn't vote for Clinton, while two Republicans refused to support the controversial billionaire.

I owe a debt to my children to leave them a nation they can trustChristopher Suprun, Texas elector

Christopher Suprun has announced in the New York Times that he intended to defect from Mr Trump, casting his vote instead for a GOP candidate he deems fit for the White House.

Suprun, who was a firefighter and a first responder to the Pentagon on 9/11, argued that he must decide whether "candidates are qualified, not engaged in demagogy, and independent from foreign influence … Mr Trump urged violence against protesters at his rallies during the campaign. He speaks of retribution against his critics."

Seven faithless electors in 2016 is usual, with the last time such a high number protested being 1912.

The last time there was a faithless elector in a presidential campaign was 2004, in an apparent error: an anonymous Minnesota elector voted for John Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, instead of the Democrat's presidential candidate.

How common are faithless electors?

There have been just 164 of them in American history, according to the voting reform group FairVote - and just under half of these votes were changed because the candidate died before the tally.

Of the remainder, a majority voted for a candidate other than the one they were required to, but they still voted for a candidate from the same party and therefore hardly altered the overall tally.

In 1872, 63 Democratic electors declined to vote for Democratic nominee Horace Greeley, who died after the election but before the electoral college vote. This is the highest number of faithless electors in any presidential election, but it still didn't impact the outcome as most of them backed another Democrat choice.

Is this even legal?

29 states - and the District of Columbia - have laws to prohibit electors from voting against their state’s popular vote. Three states punish faithless electors with fines whilst South Carolina and New Mexico impose criminal charges.

The constitution, however, does not specify how votes must be cast and, despite ruling in 1957 that states can request electors take a pledge to vote in line with their party, the Supreme Court has never ruled on how constitutional state punishments are for electors.

A faithless elector has never been prosecuted, but this may be due to the fact that an elector acting against the popular vote has never affected the outcome of a presidential election.

Could faithless electors topple Trump?

While Hillary Clinton gained 2.8m more votes than Mr Trump, he did manage to win the electoral college vote by a margin of 74 votes.

He would have needed to see 37 Republican electors reject their states' bidding to lose his majority. Only two did - indeed, at the same time as five Democrat electors did the same.

Historically, there have been times that faithless electors have forced a different outcome in a presidential election - but we have to look back a long way.

In 1836, 23 Democratic electors from Virginia refused to vote for Richard Mentor Johnson for vice president. This was because of his relationship with a black woman.

In doing so, they left him short of a majority, forcing the decision to go to the Senate. The Senate ended up making Johnson vice president anyway, but the fact remains that faithless electors altered the result from what states dictated.

In reality though, Mr Trump wasn't undermined by electors refusing to back him, for several reasons:

Mr Trump would have needed 37 Republican electors to desert him - something that hasn't happened since 1872

It would be overturning the will of the voters, and criticised as an undermining of democracy

Faithless electors almost never cross over, instead almost always voting for either another member of their own party or a third-party option.